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Music Industry Shaking Down Coffee Shops
realjd writes with news out of Florida that music licensing companies are now hitting small bars and coffee shops that offer live music, even if only occasionally and even if the musicians don't get paid. One coffee-shop owner told musicians they can only perform their own songs from now on. "A restaurant owner who doesn't even offer live music was approached for payment for having the TV on while the Monday Night Football theme played. And if the owners pay up to one licensing company, all of the others start harassing them, calling four times a day, demanding payment too. It sounds like they don't even check whether any copyright violations occurred, they're just sending bills to any business that may or may not have live music."
<sarcasm>
I must say that it's about time they cracked down on these coffeehouses! I received no payment for playing but I watched customers repeatedly purchase drinks sometimes resulting in $1, $2 or even $3 transactions! Clearly this was only because the combo I was in was playing well known standards.
In the end, I apologize to Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beta Band, The Turin Brakes, The Beatles, The Doves and all the other bands we blatantly abused to slightly increase the sales at a small fledgling establishment. I know that these artists are undoubtedly ruined by the actions of me and my fellow band mates while we were in college. In the wrongest sense, we evaded the long arm of the law and all deserve felonies if we don't face life sentences.
However, this story has a happy ending, as one of the establishments we had the most shows at (The Purple Onion) is no more now that Starbucks has moved in across the street. Corporate America wins again in this story and we no longer have to suffer from the grave injustices committed near 15th and University Ave in Dinkytown. Hopefully all of these small time operations are shut down one after the other so I don't have to see walls beautifully covered with art featuring a different student artist every week. Instead, I can rest easy in my non-world-disrupting CEO approved mainstream environments
</sarcasm>
It's too bad that this cycle will take far too long for the public to realize what they'll be losing by allowing this to occur. It's also very sad that I'm probably a minority of people who live in remorse about this sort of thing--and for that reason it will probably continue to happen. When I saw this headline, it was equivalent to "Music Licensing Companies List 'Eating Kittens' as Favorite Pastime, 'Destroying Dreams' a Close Second."
If you can point me to proof that there's any artist out there that really wants things to be this way, I'd be shocked. This is a classic case of an idea and organization formed with good intentions that has slowly become an uncontrollable machine. The worst part is that if a coffeehouse is sued, I doubt the original artist can intervene as they've probably already signed contracts punishable by death. We would have to wait for a whole new generation of musicians to arise to avoid these mistakes though I doubt they could make it without the affiliation of the large governing organizations.
Hold your local artists that are on indie labels or making it by themselves on a higher level, America. Soon, they will face extinction and your relationship to them will be governed through a man in a suit.
I'll end this post with an excerpt from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, Working for MCA: Slickers steal my money since I was seventeen,
if it ain't no pencil pusher then it got to be a honky tonk queen.
But I signed my contract, baby, and I want you people to know
that every penny I make, I gotta see where my money goes.
Want you to sign the contract,
want you to sign the date.
Gonna give you lots of money
workin' for MCA. My advice if you want to 'just happen' to hear some good live music would be to first leave the country.
My work here is dung.
Honestly, this is getting crazy. It reminds me of Stallman's short story/essay, "Right to Read" where you have to have a license to read a book you borrowed from the library or from a friend.
Music has always been something that was freely exchanged throughout human history. Songs belonged in the public domain, even if no one thought of it and framed it in those terms. There were just songs that people had always sang or played, and had no apparent author.
Now we are entering a period where the RIAA seems to think they should get a dollar from you if you whistle a tune when you walk down the sidewalk. Has the hookers and cocaine money train really slowed down that much for them? They must be a bunch of paranoid, power-mad f*cks with an extreme sense of entitlement.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Moving beyond the point that this has to be the most purely dick move I have ever heard of, isn't a live performance of a song written by someone else a cover? Isn't a cover a derivative work protected by law? I mean, Weird Al does derivative performances that copy nearly exactly the music of some artists (he usually alters only the lyrics) and every time he does a M. Jackson song he gets sued by MJ, and he always wins. What's the difference here?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
This is really getting out of hand. Pretty soon you're going to have to pay royalties if you have the radio on with passengers in your car, which isn't that far a stretch from paying royalties for songs played on a TV in a bar. It's not going to be much longer before either someone sane intervenes or the recording industry collapses under the weight of thousands of lawsuits against its primary customers.
We can hope for the latter.
At first I was just going to blow this off as yet another bar that was trying to get away with not paying it's ASCAP fees, then I read the part where one owner had already payed ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC, and were still getting billed by other piss-ant licensing companies trying to extort money out of him. Are these people for real or are they just scammers? I thought the entire purpose of having a statutory license for live performance was to avoid crap like this.
This has been how it's worked for decades. ASCAP/BMI are assigned the public performance rights to songs, and they can be very thorough about collecting from everybody owes them. In the past, they've even harrassed companies where the employees played music in areas that could be heard by the public. Own a small retail store and play CD's in the background? Then you owe them a licensing fee.
While ASCAP/BMI can be very heavy-handed, I have to say that it's hardly the worst aspect of IP law. The good part of the arrangement is that a band can perform whatever cover songs they want, and licensing is the club owner's responsibility. And, y'know, if you write a song and somebody else performs it, you ought to get paid.
The bad part is that the convenience of uniting all the performance rights under a single umbrella creates an overly powerful organization.
Funny how people think that fascism is related to loud patriotic parades, exposition of insignia and group thinking, oppression of freedom and... well you get the idea, when it can just metastasize from within the society, perfectly legal (if it is not, new "sponsored" legislation will make it so) creeping up not on freedom itself but on its "pricelessness".
Do you want to be free? There is a price for it (brought to you by $favorite_company). Did you just glance while walking down the street at the store window TV playing Super Bowl? You owe $favorite_company money my friend! Our new eye movement, eye direction-focus detectors never lie. Your eyes were focused on the TV screen for 0.134s, thus you owe us royalties buddy...
Oh, I know how all this will end alright...and it won't be pretty...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
O MFING RLY? Good intentions? I disagree! I unconcur!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I'm not certain why the article is trying to suggest that it's unfair for small companies to have to pay when they use copyrighted material to help their business. I'm not certain that I even disagree with the price some of the companies are asking for in licensing.
I'm sure some people will rant about freedom of music but the original example was $400 or £200 I honestly don't think £200 a year is that much to ask in licensing costs. The particular café should have factored in the cost of playing someone else's music when they offered the service. Reading the other examples it seems the companies are requesting proportional fee's depending on venue, this isn't some evil RIAA tactic it's a company defending its IP against small business's who have been abusing it.
I agree that the harassment tactics the companies are using is wrong and its what the article should have been about. Perhaps it should have centred itself around the idea that record companies aren't checking to see if their IP is being infringed just sending bills and harassing small business owners into giving them money. I will admit the TV theme tune demand is planly stupid and I'm not sure it would be legal. But obviously the current system needs reworking and *shock* maybe some government regulation or control so small business could navigate the system as well as put what seems rogue traders like man who claimed to own gospel IP and the TV tune claimers out of business.
But as far as I'm concerned small business's getting stung by this have only themselves to blame. Its not hard to ask a performer for a list of songs they plan to play at your venue, its not hard to google those songs and make sure that your not infringing copyright by letting them play, as for the article suggestion this is hurting budding artists I really don't care about cover bands its when the companies try to stamp out original works being played (through asking for a license fee) I'd be worried.
Except for all of the scammers, everything that BMI, etc. are doing is perfectly legal. If a business makes money because a copyrighted song is played in their establishment, they owe the copyright owner a fee. It is the law and with CD sales plummeting the way they are, if I were a professional musician I would go for all the royalties I can get from anywhere they can legally come from. The only reason that it seems so outrageous right now is that these guys have basically ignored the little guys for so long that everyone became unaware that this was the law. It's not extortion. It is really lousy for the business owners that now they have this extra cost of doing business that they were unaware of but it's really their own fault for not being aware of the laws involved in owning a business.
What's bizarre is that I have often bought CD's on foot of hearing them in bars or even my local supermarket, where they often have weird and wonderful stuff on. Surely the copyright organisations must realise that every shop that turns off its music rather than paying their fees is more lost free advertising?
Can't you see what's happening? Its been happening for over a decade now.
The music industry is slamming the small music scenes trying to make more people buy CDs because they can't find any local shows. Either that or pay $300 for a ticket to a concert that they're running 300 miles away. They're trying to kill the competition.
And yeah, they pretty much just go through the phone book and pick coffee houses to harass. I would say that if you're a coffee house that has paid and you haven't broken any obvious laws, that you should be entitled to that money back PLUS administrative fees.
What if I walked in, said you were violating a law that you were not, and demanded payment. What's that called again?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't sports broadcasts (Footbal et al.) have a very large portion of their time taken up by commercials? Isn't it beneficial for the broadcasters to have their commercials put in front of hundreds of consumers? It's not like bars/restaurants mute the TV or change the channel or use PVR "commercial skip" measures during commercial breaks. The volume is also typically quite loud so the broadcast can be heard over the normal bar banter so what's the problem?
Further to this, commercials broadcast during a football game are generally geared towards the very demographic of those patrons in the bar. 20-50 year old males with a propensity towards alcohol, women, social activities, cars/trucks, etc. so the commercials are being broadcast directly into a testosterone filled den of the core target audience. Moreover, you know if these men are at a bar they have the disposable income with which to purchase the promoted products so they're more likely to have a positive input for the advertisers and therefore the network(s) broadcasting the event.
Am I missing something here?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I agree with lots of the posts from Americans I have seen here in slashdot before that state that if USA is *this* terrible why are people still willing to live there? I really can not understand it, what is it there in the USA that people, even some Britons (I live in Britain today) want to live there??
Guns. Lots of guns.
And low taxes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Here are a few reasons,
we aren't being dominated by insane Islamofacists,
it's a lot less expensive,
the USA is still the land of opportunity.
In short, it isn't so terrible at all.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
You'll probably find that there's a bit of an overlap between the two groups.
I'd be surprised if there weren't...
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Thing is, cover bands playing in bars and coffee shops has been a part of Canadian / American culture for decades. Only now are these organizations attempting to extort money out of people who are just doing what their parents and their parents parents have been doing for their entire adult lives but now, with the scapegoat of Internet piracy, they're extorting money out of every source possible in order to regain the profits they believe they rightly deserve.
What the recording industries need to learn is that profit is not a guaranteed right in a capitalist society. You do not have the right to guarantee your own profitability by destroying that of other, smaller businesses.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
How is it different? Why do you assert that it isn't the same people? They're doing the same kinds of things, using the same kinds of tools. I.e., legal threats based on unjust laws.
Also, why, even if they aren't the same people, shouldn't I think equally bad things about them? And why not also blame the RIAA? Even if the companies that they represent have a different front in this particular instance, that doesn't mean that I should let them off the hook for blame. If nothing else, they purchased the law that this abuse is based on. Also, they established the climate where this kind of thing is considered "good business practice".
You ASSERT that it isn't the RIAA. To me they look like the same group of people. Until I see a significant distinction, then I'm not going to differentiate.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
we aren't being dominated by insane Islamofacists,
You're right. In the US, we get to be dominated by Christofacists. Lucky us.
"You ASSERT that it isn't the RIAA. To me they look like the same group of people. Until I see a significant distinction, then I'm not going to differentiate."
The RIAA is run by and for record labels.
ASCAP and BMI -- the "bad guys" in this situation -- are run by and for artists.
If you believe that anybody who demands money for music is evil, then by all means -- you are 100% correct. Both the RIAA as well as ASCAP/BMI deserve your hate. You can stop right here.
For those who would like more information:
Here is information about ASCAP. Here is information about BMI.
As others have pointed out, ASCAP and BMI have been providing performance rights licences for many decades. It's a great way for composers and songwriters to make money without having to rely on record companies. We want artists to succeed without having to rely on record labels, right? Performance rights are the way for us to enjoy music for free, to avoid giving money to record companies, and for artists to make money doing what they love. It's sad that this is not enough for you.
I'm a bit boggled by your statement that the RIAA "purchased the law that this abuse is based on." ASCAP and BMI have been looking out for artists' rights for longer than the RIAA has been around. Please clarify.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
work is work! I get a check for physical work. If I want another check, I have to do it again, or do something different, then I get another check. I can't tell my boss "ooohh, that work I did last month was performance art! Ya, that's the ticket, performance art! You owe me royalties now every time you even think about it! And if you *dare* have someone else do the same exact work, I'll sue for copyright infringement!!1one" "
Nope, sorry, "artists" want money, they can go to work same as everyone else. They want to make more on the side, sell schwag and CDs right at the venue. Get famous enough, sell freakin autographs.
Signature applied for, Patent Pending
Spammers plight my ass, your analogy is extremely poor. That 100 emails times the fifty thousand users in my company's email server. How much time and effort to try and block that crap at our expense. Storage & Bandwidth at our expense. Paying 50,000 people to spend 10-20 minutes a day pressing delete. Spammers should pay us, preferably in a cell. Musicians don't write songs in a vacuum either. How many of those song 'writers' have performed others work for years without paying? Almost every song uses chord progressions exactly the same as those in other songs. Try searching the lyrics one line at a time on google and find out how many other songs or poems have many of the exact same phrases.